But never fear all you big chain hotel loyalty program members, it isn't just boutique hotels that are changing the hotel offerings. With the opening of LA Live, Marriott Hotels has monopolized the surrounding block with their JW Marriott, Ritz-Carlton and their upcoming Residence Inn and Courtyard By Marriott hotels. Which is perhaps why their relinquishing the flag at the Downtown LA Marriott on Figueroa Street.

DLTA Rising with Brigham Yen reports that Marriott ceased operating the hotel on August 4th. In its place is the temporary "The L.A. Hotel Downtown" but DLTA reports that the new brand going may be a Hyatt Regency.

The Huffington Post reports that hotelier Andre Balazs is very much on board with the idea and will even make some "major" changes to the hotel's mezzanine floor of which SPiN will occupy the entire space.

The club is expected to launch in early Fall and its opening will be the culmination of a bunch of SPiN tournaments held at other Standard Hotels in Miami and New York.

"Words with Friends" geeks should put down the iPhone and show their vocab skills in a live, face-to-face game of Scrabble at the Standard Downtown LA. The hotel hosts free Scrabble nights Tuesdays from 7 to 9 p.m. in its lobby.

But of course the Standard doesn't just throw a bunch of old board games haphazardly around a room and tell people to play amongst themselves. Instead, there's a ginormous Scrabble board that puts our deluxe set to shame, and it's manned by a host.

If you carnivores out there crave a meaty meal, but want something different from the usual Kobe burger, sink your teeth into a bear burger instead at the Standard Downtown LA.

New chef Micah Fields will offer a new exotic patty each week as part of 24/7 Restaurant's new "Burger of the Week" special. Starting today, it will serve up Yogi. Or, more accurately, Smokey, since it's called the "Smokey the Bear Burger."

YES, it actually gets cold enough in Los Angeles to call for The Standard-Hollywood and The Standard-Downtown LA to throw some woolen Pendleton blanket on their guestroom beds and YES of course they are selling them to anyone who wants to take home the artist-created designs themselves.

The two blankets were officially released into the Standard Shop just before Thanksgiving, and indeed they could be ideal gifts for the person in your life that obsesses over staying at one of Andre Balazs' hotels.

The reality TV competition, America's Got Talent, is known for providing wacky, bizarre, and sometimes frightening entertainment week after week but this past weekend, during the show's audition process at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, things went horribly wrong.

TMZ reports that a contestant, Joe Finley, who was auditioning for the show, is now a person of interest in the death investigation of his wife.

Laura Finley was found at the bottom of a stairwell inside the hotel on Saturday morning by another hotel guest. It is believed she fell from the 11th floor to the third. She had been missing for several hours.

Worse, her husband apparently knew she had been missing but he still went on to the America's Got Talent audition. And this is where it gets really bizarre.

Here’s a Thanksgiving conundrum we face every year: after starving ourselves all day, we finally get to chow down on a huge family feast at about 4pm, finish at 7 (or 8 if you help clean up), and then…nothing. What are you to do for the rest of the evening?

Sure, there’s a little apathy-inducing tryptophan coma to overcome, but after all that food, sometimes you just want to get out and move around. Or hang out with some people you’re not related to (or married into). Only there’s nowhere to go and no one to go with—unless you end up calling people you used to hate in high school in the hopes that they too have been dragged home for the holidays.

So you end up stuck watching reruns with your family as everyone starts snoring around the TV. Until now.

Both locations of the Standard Hotel in Los Angeles are offering Thanksgiving activities so you can eat as much as you want and stay out as late as you want. They’ll even cook you dinner if you’ve left plans to the last minute, and both are charging a remarkably reasonable rate for their prix-fixe menus.

'Tis the season for a parade of hotel parties. Holiday dinners in the hundred dollar range are just around the corner, but it's Halloween that precedes the hanging of tinsel from marble-tiled lobbies. Most of the upcoming events we've heard of are the standard ballroom/costume/D.J. affairs that attract crowds of 20-somethings. Raucous fun, maybe, but they also tend to bring out scenesters in droves, which leaves those looking to celebrate over classy cocktails in a lurch.

Enter L.A.'s Millennium Biltmore, who is hosting an "All Hallow's Eve" party at their Gallery Bar on October 31st from 4:00 PM to 2:00 AM, and forgoing "sexy nurse" overtures in favor of a vintage vibe. The Millennium may not have haunted hotel room lore like that of The Roosevelt, but it did serve as one of the filming locations for Ghostbusters, if that means anything to you.

So far this week, we’ve taken you to Santa Monica, the Sunset Strip and Beverly Hills, so we thought we’d end our Los Angeles What’s On The Block series with one of our downtown haunts, The Standard.

Sure, there are newer hotels in the area, but we keep coming back to this Andre Balazs property thanks, in no small part, to its central location in the heart of the downtown. At least, the part of downtown that doesn’t get too scary after dark.

Let’s start right behind the hotel at the LA Public Library and Park. The Central Library, which opened in 1926, is a bona fide Los Angeles landmark. Learn more about the architecture and notable art works of the building on a Docent Tour (our favorites are the scary fairy tale sculptures in the children’s court). Try not to get hit by a skateboarder as you cross the little park for a luxe lunch on the patio at Café Pinot.

The Westin Bonaventure has caught our attention as of late for all their frantic Twitter deals but it's never really been top on our list of Los Angeles hotels to visit, or even on our list of Downtown Los Angeles hotels to visit. This is despite the hotel being a Westin brand with its relaxing, white tea scents and those coveted SPG points and despite the hotel's revolving cocktail lounge at the top of the hotel.

Still the Twitter deals had us intrigued so we decided to head downtown the other week and see what was new at the hotel. We are happy to report that there's a lot in the works. But the key words are: "in the works."

The hotel was built in 1976 by architect John Portman who created four separate towers of hotel rooms (there's over 1,300 in total) that are joined together by a large atrium at the ground level. This serves as the hotel's lobby as well as a sort of shopping plaza where about 42 shops and restaurants have opened.

For a long time, the cavernous Spanish-colonial gem of a former lobby at downtown Los Angeles’s Millennium Biltmore Hotel was going to waste as a way station for travelers checking in and out without giving the breathtaking hall the attention it deserved. Now, however, the hotel is putting the three-story space front and center as the location of its new Italian steakhouse, La Bistecca.

The lobby, which has touches of a bygone era like hand-carved wooden ceiling beams, Travertine walls, and an enormous chandelier that even the Phantom of the Opera would enjoy, has also added a huge rose marble fountain in the middle of the new 70-person seating area.

Carnivores can get six different cuts of steak, including a bone-in rib eye, and slow-roasted prime rib. The meats come, Sicilian-style, with a variety of simple accompaniments and sauces like the Barolo wine sauce, a mascarpone-horseradish cream, and a marinated porcini béarnaise.

Vegans might have a hard time finding something to eat here since even the salads have cream-based dressings, and all the antipasti and pasta dishes include some kind of meat, but you know what? You can hit a Whole Foods anytime, this is for a special night out at an old-school steakhouse.

For the next six months, guests and passersby at the Standard Hotel’s two L.A. properties will be treated to a video art show by artist and Guggenheim fellow Kalup Linzy, whose works have also appeared at New York’s MoMa, and the Whitney.

Entitled Key to Our Heart and SweetBerry Sonnet, Linzy’s works are meant to raise questions about gender, sexuality, race, class and popular culture by mocking soap operas’ and Hollywood films’ storytelling conventions—and many of Linzy’s works feature the male artist dressed in outlandish women’s clothing for an added impact.